1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to data processing environments with large document repositories and, more specifically, to a technique for handling content off-loading from a document processing system to a remote repository.
2. Description of the Related Art
Mailing client applications, such as Lotus™ Notes™ or Microsoft™ Outlook™, have a problem in that they contain continuously growing document repositories. These repositories store the incoming and outgoing notes or emails which often include large attachments such as text documents, graphics or even storage consuming digitized pictures. The notes and emails will be referred to hereafter as documents. As the repository grows larger, performance becomes a problem and storage resources can be used up. To keep the size of the repository manageable, a Lotus Notes application uses a Lotus Domino™ database from which a tool like IBM Content Manager CommonStore™ for Lotus Domino (CSLD) is used to move documents stored in that database to an archive physically located on a different device like a tape storage. CSLD thereupon permits a user access to documents that have previously been archived. Lotus, Notes, Domino and CommonStore are registered trademarks or trademarks of Lotus Development Corp. and/or International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), and Mircrosoft and Outlook are trademarks of Mircosoft Corp.
CSLD also permits access to documents that have been archived from any archive client application (e.g., scanning applications, CommonStore for SAP™, etc.). When a document is retrieved from the archive to a Notes database, a Lotus Notes document is created. SAP is a trademark of SAP AG.
IBM Content Manager CommonStore™ for Lotus Domino (CSLD) is a tool for moving Lotus Notes documents in various formats to an archive. CSLD also allows access to documents that have been archived from any archive client application (e.g., scanning applications, CommonStore for SAP™, etc). When documents are retrieved from the archive to a Notes database, a Lotus Notes document is created.
The IBM Archive Content Manager and another tool called OnDemand maintain an index about archived documents. This means that archived documents can be deleted from Lotus Notes, since it is possible to find them later by searching the archive's index. In contrast, Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) does not provide an index of its own, but rather leaves it up to the archiving application to maintain an index. That is, TSM itself does not allow searching for archived documents.
CSLD uses the original documents within Notes to maintain the index. When a Notes document is archived via CSLD, it is assigned a unique identifier (ID) by the archive. CSLD generally writes this document archive ID to a field in the original Notes document. This allows retrieval of an archived document by ID without performing a search in the archive.
A drawback of the above prior art approaches is that when a document is deleted from Notes, the link to the archived document is completely lost. With Content Manager and OnDemand, the archived document could still be retrieved via an archive search. For TSM, however, since it does not provide an index to search over, there is no way to retrieve an archived document once the only Notes document containing the link to it is deleted. Therefore, CSLD does not allow deleting a document from Notes that has been archived to TSM.
However, there is a need also for CSLD to release expensive disk space by archiving/off-loading complete Notes documents.